


Waning

by miloron (ocoa)



Series: I don’t want to wake up in the morning [2]
Category: NU'EST
Genre: Anxiety, Death, Depression, Gen, Grief, Insomnia, Mental Illness, implied eating disorder, implied panic attack, lotsa stuff, mention of self harm, ooc probably, slight denial, trigger warning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-20
Updated: 2018-08-20
Packaged: 2019-06-30 05:56:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,245
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15745659
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ocoa/pseuds/miloron
Summary: Aron’s gone and got himself a mental illness.





	Waning

**Author's Note:**

> Please read the tags!! Heavy stuff ahead

When Aron was younger, he wakes up and finds his sister holding a knife over her wrist and a look in her eyes like she’s not quite there. He stumbles forward in a haze, pulls it away from her and her vision clears like she was in a dream, and it immediately fills with tears and realisation and shame and he holds her in his arms until the body wracking sobbing stops. She doesn’t really say a word after that, but a few days later she tells him that she wants to see a therapist. She had been bullied, and they hadn’t known. They hadn’t known and Aron feels so stupid because they were in the same school and he hadn’t known his little sister had been bullied by her peers. She’s diagnosed with mild anxiety and depression, and treated with Xanax and other medications but some days she disappears and they find her standing over a ledge and sobbing. It’s an uphill battle and it’s takes a long time for her to recover, and even when he leaves for Korea when he’s 19 he’s still worried and she still Skypes him when she feels it building up.

When he goes to Korea he gets to know the group of boys he’s thrown into with just a few months of training under his belt. They’re talented beyond words and their words muddle together but they’re kind and Aron is amazed to know them the way he does. It’s hard to imagine how they’re all younger than him when they had years of training and a weight and desperation in their eyes. He debuts with them happily, so proud when their music video views pile up and keep going up and their name (“Nu’est” which was all sorts of cool) keeps getting shown in articles everywhere and they’re something of monster rookies with senior groups patting their back and congratulating them. It’s amazing, and Aron could only wish it would get better than this.

It doesn’t.

He finds out that Jonghyun’s unable to sleep, jolting awake when he hears someone accidentally dropping a cup in the sink. Jonghyun’s standing over the shattered porcelain, thoughts whirring in his head so openly that it radiates off him. Aron hurries to clear the mess before Jonghyun hurts himself trying to pick up the pieces, waves off the hurried apologies and sits Jonghyun down with a cup of warm milk.

It’s only then that Aron realised how bad Jonghyun’s eye bags were, how red his eyes have become from lack of sleep. He remembers how the makeup artists had commented that but just assumed that Jonghyun was practicing. He feels stupid now, having not even considering why Jonghyun had the time to practice.

He hasn’t been sleeping at all, Jonghyun confessed, so quiet his voice might as well had been the whir of the fan. He’s so tired that he feels sick, tossing and turning until the discomfort gags at him, until the thoughts tip him over and he finds himself choking up over his tiredness and stress mixing over each other and the desperation of “I can’t sleep” and “I need to sleep” has him up on his feet trying to do something to make use of his time until he actually is tired, but the hours just keep going until he has blood coursing through his ears and sun peeking from the windows. Aron doesn’t know how to help that, but he offers to let Jonghyun rest on his bed beside him, at least for a change in pace, so they try that. Jonghyun doesn’t sleep much that night, but Aron tries to lull him to sleep by talking about math and linguistics until he feels Jonghyun’s breath even out against his arm. He sleeps for two hours, at least until Aron shifts wrongly and his eyes shot open and the guilt that Aron feels when Jonghyun can’t go back to sleep bites at him through the night.

He Googles everything about insomnia, messages friends about anything that could help, and maybe it evens out just a bit, enough that Jonghyun can actually sleep every night, even when it fluctuates from five hours to one, but it’s more than Jonghyun had been getting. When the rest find out, they start sharing their beds with Jonghyun, and they move aside when he crawls in at 2am, arms curling around him, trying to protect him from the fear he feels, the thoughts of “I’m not good enough”, the anxiety and stress and everything that plagues his nights.

It helps, but sometimes it’s not good enough, and some days it ends with Jonghyun curled into the crux of someone’s shoulder, apologising wetly as he cries and cries and all of them stay near to each other, scared and off kilter by their leader, by far the strongest of them all, sounding so small and young, only reminding Aron of how young they all were.

It’s scary to think of how much they’ve gone through, and Aron felt helpless, wishing he could do something as the oldest.

The four of them, his younger brothers, have to go onto a survival show. Aron hurts his leg so all he can do is watch them, calling their mentor to make sure they’re okay, messaging them so that whenever they get their phones back the first thing they see is an encouraging message, keeping check of their progress and their fans. It makes him relieved when he sees their instagram followers increase, as do their music video views, and suddenly their name is all over Twitter. “How did I not know of them before?” people ask, and god he’s so proud that he tears up. He ignores the helplessness he feels when he’s at home, knee healing, ignores the niggling feeling inside him that he could have been there, supporting and walking alongside them, ignoring the what if- what if people don’t like him when they see Nu’est’s songs, what if he ends up forgotten, thrown aside, because that’s selfish and he should be happy that they’re getting love.

Minki calls him, and it’s clear from the thick layer in his voice that he’s tired, so tired, and that for some reason he’s not appearing onscreen no matter what he does, and he’s barely holding together. Aron doesn’t know how to comfort him, so he just says the customary words and tries to inject as much sincerity as he could possibly into the words, making some offhand self derogatory jokes. Minki is quiet at those, so he quickly changes tactics and tells him of what stupid things happened at the dorm that day. (Mingyu nearly crushed Jihoon when they were playing around, tripping over himself. He received a real beating, and Seungcheol had to step in. “Why didn’t you stop them Hyung” he had asked Aron, and he mimicked The Voice to Minki which makes the boy laugh. Seungcheol was always such a mother, and the image of Jihoon rounding around Mingyu again was always funny by principle.)

Minki sounds better by the end of it so Aron feels relieved. It’s a temporary thing, but even then, it’s good enough to help Minki stay on, and Aron finds that for now he’s just glad he could help.

After Produce, it gets harder.

Jonghyun doesn’t make it, and maybe he’s alright with it, but things linger, so Aron remembers to hug Jonghyun and tell him that he’s proud of him no matter what. He also sends them all the message that Hello has resurfaced, that all their titles climbed up to the top, even Love Paint which had so much hope and desperation in it but had ultimately failed. Suddenly, like a dream, all their songs were ranked, actually ranked, and their managers get messages and pings for them, for Nu’est to go for interviews and invitations to shows and it’s everything they’ve dreamed of.

Then Dongho’s father passes, and everything feels off. Grief that sit well with Dongho, and Aron tries to get him to rest as much as he tries to hide in his work, leaves food around. Minki even steps in to talk to Dongho, and he’s much better at it than Aron, so Dongho packs to go home for the funeral.

“Is it okay to,” Dongho asks Aron one night when he gets home, and while Aron feels like he’s the worst person to be asked this, he shakes his head.

“Don’t, just go. Your dad would want you to be there, and your mom would too.”

Dongho nods, blinks through tired eyes, and the next morning he flies off.

He still has the same look when he comes home, and all of them (especially Jonghyun) take turns sitting with him as he works, quietly doing their own things in the back and making sure he eats and drinks and rests. It takes a while, but at the end of it all Dongho comes out still sad, but better. On the road.

And it’s great from then on, their fans increase, they win awards (and they’re so surprised that they crumple onto the ground and can’t stop thanking their fans), and Aron is grateful, blessed, happy.

Except he’s not happy, sometimes.

Sometimes he stares up at the clock and watching the time slip by, a weight building in his chest and ballooning until he feels tears build in his eyes. Which is stupid, because unlike his sister, unlike Jonghyun and Minki and Dongho, unlike Minhyun who still feels guilt at being the only one winning, who wakes up in cold sweat because he thinks he hears a girl giggling at him in his apartment where he feels so unsafe, who is overworked till he loses weight dramatically, he has never had a reason to be sad. His family was always supportive and had provided him the best he could get. His members too were supportive and listened to him when he was down. He had friends who would die for him like he would die for them. He has fans who only message good things. He never had a reason for this never ending ache in his chest, never had a reason for the inadequacy.

He shudders at memories of events long gone, grips at his hair when he remembers saying things he shouldn’t have said, stop eating so much outside in fear that someone would see him and think that he eats too much, and everything starts to bubble over.

The jokes that were once jokes come as a habit and he finds himself laughing at his inadequacies and his failures until he’s convinced that it was healthy. “Well if I die maybe Nu’est would actually get number 1” he jokes to his friends, who tell him to stop it but he finds that he can’t. Words flow from his mouth so fluidly, consciously, that he doesn’t quite understand what he’s saying, and he starts to find less meaning in them even when he knows what he’s saying is wrong.

“Bro,” a friend had told him, semi joking but maybe not, “do you want a therapist or something? It’s not normal to have thoughts like that.”

It hits him that time, even when he’s entertained the thought before, that he went and gotten himself depression, or anxiety, or maybe something else, or both, of everything. The thought is so devastatingly hilarious because who the hell goes from trying to help people through their difficulties to getting the same themselves? There must have been some sort of cosmic irony in play.

He laughs so hard he starts to cry, and everything starts to fit as he realised how far in he was. It’s so stupidly dramatic that he wonders if he’s just parroting, or if this was some unconscious need to be something, or if this was his desperate cry for help but he doesn’t know for certain. All he knows is that he doesn’t know anything about himself, and he realises that everything he thought was a certainty doesn’t even fit him anymore. He doesn’t even know how to broach the topic with anyone, because every time he does he’s just reminded how he shouldn’t, because they were busy, because they were tired, because they already had so much on their plate that he shouldn’t bother them. He doesn’t know what to say because who wants to hear how their friend has depressive thoughts that end in suicidal ideation? Who wants to think about how he thinks he’s not good enough at singing and dancing so he pushes himself harder at everything else, how he thinks he’s not thin enough so he doesn’t eat, how he stays up at night thinking of ways to ignore his thoughts without actually finding help? It’s really just his fault when he falls sick, when his leg starts to act up, when he suddenly can’t breathe as well when Minhyun is introducing him to the rest of Wanna One and he’s rushing through his introduction as much as he tries to listen to everyone’s names and conversations so that he doesn’t miss anything out so that he could leave faster but not be rude or cause the other person to feel as bad as he does when someone forgets him.

“Are you okay,” he’s asked constantly when fans pick up on his discomfort, he says yes but in all honesty, he doesn’t know the answer.

**Author's Note:**

> I have a feeling someone’s gonna come at me for some of the things “Aron” thinks in this fic. I know that mental illness can affect everyone and anyone but these are some genuine thoughts I’ve had. There are some incorrect ideas being said here, and no one should deserve help less than others. If you believe that you have any symptoms, I think that you should talk to a counsellor or a close friend. Suicide or thinking of such is not something to be ignored. I’ve struggled with these thoughts, and there was a period of time when I actually planned a deadline for myself (quite literal) where I’d finish my uni year before the next school fee payment comes in so I don’t waste my parents’ money. the whole reason I wrote this was because of these thoughts. Don’t let yourself struggle alone. Contact someone, go for online counselling. You deserve to be alive and to have the best life you can lead. And whatever it is you have done well. 
> 
> I love you. 
> 
> Thank you for reading.
> 
> > Follow me on twitter @kwaks43!


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